I've seen a lot of these RCA portables but never in this color. it's original, paint is on the bottom and the tags are still in place.

Found this on CL last week and after a week of failed E-mail attempts with AOL I was finally able to get in touch with the seller through my Hotmail account.

I drove down to Artesia this morning and picked it up for $30.
He was a nice guy too, he felt bad that I had to drive 70 miles and was going to knock $5 off the price for the gas but I told him that wasn't necessary.

It's in rough shape, cabinet's dented on top and there's some rust here and there but I can either bang it back into shape or replace the cabinet with one from a fairly shoddy, yet undented two tone blue set I have, it will need to be repainted in any case.

Seller said it was working somewhat until the vertical collapsed completely.

Wow.... Kinda "greenish" with envy here....... :D

SR

After looking inside I'm not sure how accurate the "was working" description was, or how long ago.

Set was dead, thermal delay relay clicked on and heaters lit but not a sound, reason was the 5U4 had gone to air, getter white, replaced it and brought it up slowly, now I had sound but no light on the screen, it looked like the CRT heater wasn't even lit.

The CRT had a brightener on it, the set is a parallel heater set, the brightener was set to Series, I just removed it and then the heater came on, a little fiddling with the horiz hold coil and I got a weak raster, horizontal is way off and the vertical is really screwed up.

The CRT checks very, very weak, the glass around the heater is completely blackend with Tungsten deposits so it has a ton of hours on it.

I put the Beltron on it and it came to life with a big show of sparks in the neck and great emissions, the life test is pretty bad though.

Anyhow I have a NOS CRT that will work in this set, it's a series string tube with an 8.4 volt heater but I figure if I put the brightener back on it should come out just about right!

After looking inside I'm not sure how accurate the "was working" description was, or how long ago.

Set was dead, thermal delay relay clicked on and heaters lit but not a sound, reason was the 5U4 had gone to air, getter white, replaced it and brought it up slowly, now I had sound but no light on the screen, it looked like the CRT heater wasn't even lit.

The CRT had a brightener on it, the set is a parallel heater set, the brightener was set to Series, I just removed it and then the heater came on, a little fiddling with the horiz hold coil and I got a weak raster, horizontal is way off and the vertical is really screwed up.

The CRT checks very, very weak, the glass around the heater is completely blackend with Tungsten deposits so it has a ton of hours on it.

I put the Beltron on it and it came to life with a big show of sparks in the neck and great emissions, the life test is pretty bad though.

Anyhow I have a NOS CRT that will work in this set, it's a series string tube with an 8.4 volt heater but I figure if I put the brightener back on it should come out just about right!
IIRC, the brighteners only run the tube at 7.5 volts. It might work OK, seeing it's a new CRT. Have fun restoring the set! A lot of work, but worth it.

And speaking of painting cabinets.

Unlike that Coral and Black Cabinet in another thread, I went to extra lengths to restore this one back to it's original color, or as close as I could get from the vintage paint catalog.

The other set took about an hour to knock out, this took me hours and hours of metal work, bondo and primer.

Is that a 17CDP4? I just traded a black-gold one like yours to another VK member much better at body restoration.

The CRT in that one needed some time on the tester IIRC, it tests worse than it looks anyway.

Turquoise will always be the top '50's color in my opinion. Those RCA Deluxe portables are nightmares to work on though. I had two in the past and got rid of both because my repairman could not get them working right. The yokes are often disintegrated too. Good luck!